By David E. Williams, March 31, 2008
The secret to keeping people excitedly coming back to the annual National Association of Broadcasters Show each and every year is simple, says Robert L. Ott, Vice President for Optical and Professional Products at Sony Electronics: “Just keep coming up with new and exciting products,” he deadpans, explaining how the technology giant will continue to ride the wave of excitement over their recent camera introductions, including the HVR-Z7U, HVR-S270U and, in particular, the PMW-EX1. “But we will have a surprise announcement at the show. I’m guaranteeing a surprise.”
That’s not really a surprise, though, is it? The NAB “surprise” is an institution as old as the organization itself, which enters its eighth decade this year. (Oh, but will Sony’s surprise involve the EX1? “Yes,” Ott confirms with an almost imperceptible chuckle and little more.)
“Scarlet” was the one-word reply offered by Red Digital Cinema spokesman and ”Leader of the Rebellion” Ted Schilowitz when asked about his company’s big NAB secret for ’08, alluding to what has been described by the rumor mill as a “pocket professional digital cinema camera,” presumably using the Redcode RAW codec. “You’ll have to come to the booth to find out.”
Schilowitz adds that while NAB has no special power to help launch a product, “you have the attention of the industry for a brief moment and you have to capitalize on it.”
Red has famously capitalized on the marketing power of the “NAB announcement” since unveiling the Red One camera concept in 2005, and then wowing the crowd last year with their “test footage” short Crossing the Line, directed by Peter Jackson. “You’re probably giving us too much credit; that was just luck the way that came together,” Schilowitz says, offering a “we’ll see” when asked if his iconic crimson screening tent would this year feature footage from Red enthusiasts Steven Soderbergh and Timur Bekmambetov. “To be honest, we’ve been focused on shipping cameras, but we will have something.”
Schilowitz notes that as last year ushered the beginning of the tapeless acquisition transition, this year “we’ll see it as becoming much more the norm than the exception, between Red and others pushing tapeless workflow.”
Perhaps the most unexpected NAB surprises for ’08 were unveiled some months ago, when Avid and then Apple announced that they would not be attending the show, saving each company an estimated $3-5 million in exhibition expenses. Both cited strategic shifts in their respective marketing approaches, which would include attending fewer trade shows (though Avid and Apple confirmed that representatives would be somewhere near the Las Vegas Convention Center April 11-17) and increased reliance on the Web and direct outreach to their user groups.
In regard to Apple, one has to also assume that the company has reached a certain saturation point in terms of public awareness given the relentless media blitz surrounding their releases of the iPhone and Air laptop.
As a result, two of the biggest players in the hotly contested NLE space have sidelined themselves, leaving the playing field open to Adobe (Premiere), Sony (Vegas) and Grass Valley (Edius), among others.
For Adobe, exhibiting at NAB — where they are showcasing their new Media Player content distribution and management Web software — was a no-brainer. “I feel incredibly strong about the importance of NAB to our customer base and about the amount of potential growth out there, even if there’s the threat of a recession,” says Simon Hayhurst, Senior Director of Product Management, Dynamic Media at Adobe. “When I look across our customer base, going tapeless has gone from something people were talking about to something people are doing or about to do because they know they’re late. That’s most true in broadcast, at the high end, because they have the budgets, but the change has almost hit the bottom as well, as companies like Panasonic have introduced a $1,000 tapeless HD camera that can take a 16-gig card. That’s affordable. So the middle of the market is what’s being squeezed. And that’s driving growth. I feel better about the next two years in terms of potential industry growth than I did about the last two. And this year’s NAB is a seminal opportunity for us to reach 100,000 or more people on the cusp of that growth.”
So far as Adobe’s “big NAB announcement” is concerned, “the Media Player is a main focus right now — and we just had other announcements with the Flash Server — but we will have something, I’m sure.” He points to such strategic industry issues as the searchability of massive content archives and the need to seamlessly deliver media simultaneously across all possible platforms — including broadcast, Internet, cell phone and PDAs — as areas that Adobe is working on.
“I’m also essentially living through my second HD revolution,” observes Hayhurst, who has been attending NAB since 1995 — essentially the edge of the current generation of many digital video tools in use today. “The first came during my 10 years at SGI in the 1990s, before I came to Adobe, when we were doing simultaneous HD streams and then multiple 4K streams, but that was being done for people with budgets on steroids. This time, it’s for everybody. And even if you’re looking to do higher-end work, you can base your system on a standardized tool set, like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. You don’t need anything exotic
. The shift is more and more toward commoditizing and the democratizing the process, even at the highest end.”
As evidence, Hayhurst points to the correlation between the ever-evolving size of pixels and Moore’s Law: “In 1990, my screen was 640x480 and today it’s HD. Plot that on a graph against Moore’s Law and it’s really clear as to what’s happening. Look at networking trends and the evolution of file size. It’s nowhere near Moore’s Law. What this means is that every year it’s easier to create and distribute rich media content. And that’s an unstoppable trend.”
Adobe’s Media Player is being offered in direct response to this, as it brings a level of command and control to the Web’s content management battlefield, arming users with the ability to protect their assets while monetizing them in the marketplace. “When you look at the primary challenge facing the industry, it’s not about capture or editing or delivery, it’s about that workflow toward consumption.”
Could there be a “lite” consumer-grade version of Media Player on the distant horizon? “When I think about what the Media player is trying to do, at the heart of it is providing the best, most enjoyable experience possible while viewing content on the Internet,” Hayhurst says. “It should be as easy as using your television in terms of finding and viewing the content you want. Until those pieces are in place, that’s job one. From there, we can take that technology to a lot of different places. An infinite number of places.”
Looking at where the digital production and delivery business — and thusly NAB — is going from his perspective, Sony Electronics’ Ott uses the EX1 camcorder as a symbolic indicator: “Three years ago, we looked at the market; that’s the reason it does 1080i and 720p and doesn’t address standard def. Working at the time with the major NLE makers, we knew that they would have the capability to easily convert an HD image to SD.”
In essence, why saddle a product with legacy baggage as the market is moving forward, given that the interoperability between production and post tools can fill the need?
Indeed, any developer or manufactured who continues to work with the SD past in mind or in an alliance-free vacuum does so at their own peril, overcompensating on selected issues while ignoring others that may prove vital to their integration into the ever-evolving workflow.
“There’s a growing interdependency between the tooling end and the consumption end and everything in between,” Hayhurst says. “And it’s normal for an emerging, maturing industry. And if you are able to integrate across that interdependency chain, then good things happen.”
“Because everything begins with acquisition, Red has potential partners along the entire workflow,” says Schilowitz. “Anybody downstream from that is a potential partner, and anybody interested in partnering with us is of interest.” And, as he explains, not only do all companies have to be open to partnership in order to succeed, but users must as well. “It’s the cross-pollination of ideas and capabilities that drive things.”
In addition to this growing web of tech, the cost-to-capability ratio is continuing its favorable direction and the process of digital content creation increasingly democratized by the accessibility of lower-cost, higher-quality tools. “I think this trend makes anybody interested in investing in HD very happy,” says Ott. “In regard to the EX1, one of the biggest problems we’ve had is people looking at it like it’s a $30,000 camera and they have to be reminded that it’s a $7,000 camera. The specs are up there.”
“It wasn’t our intention, but we’ll take credit for helping to democratize the process,” says Red’s Schilowitz. “It’s not something we think about. We’re just trying to build a camera that doesn't have many restrictions and can be used for digital cinematography. The byproduct of all that — its capability, the price point, everything — is part of the shift we’re seeing in the market. We want to sell a lot of cameras, not just supply the rental houses. We wanted to make something everybody could access.”
“The very nature of the business — especially broadcasting — is changing as we speak,” says Ott. “If I want to watch the news, I watch the news. If I want to just watch a news clip, maybe I’ll go to the MSNBC Web site. You might pull up that same clip on your Sony Ericsson phone. But whether you get your news on a phone, computer, PDA or television, somebody has to shoot those images with a professional camera. You know why? Because of the value of the archive. Fifty years from now, when we’re watching holographic television, we’ll want to look back and see high-quality images, and that archive will be there if you’re shooting and finishing in HD today.”
Ott points to NBC’s decision to go HD on The Tonight Show in 2000: “Not a lot of people had HD TVs at the time, but that archive had more value in HD, and it became a big benefit recently during the Writer’s Guild strike. It’s about putting the best possible image into your archive for later.”
For non-broadcasters, however, knowing how their HD images could be viewed by clients remains an issue — though one further defined by February’s demise of the HD-DVD format. “There are still issues with Blu-ray authoring,” Ott confirms, “but they are being resolved. Regardless, the installed base of players is growing. A few years ago, people weren’t willing to shoot weddings in HD because there was no easy way for customers to play it back. But we’ve returned with a nice business plan: shoot in HD, supply the finished program on SD DVD and in two years, after the clients decide to spend a buck or two, give them the Blu-ray version. I hate the term ‘future-proofing,’ but working in HD today is planning for tomorrow.”
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